ah, fall

I've decided that I really like fall. I like when the weather starts to cool off and the humidity drops. I like that work starts to get a little busy: busy enough to give me something to do so I'm not bored, but not so busy that I go crazy. And I like that football is on and we spend all day cooking! Yesterday we hit the farmers market and had all these plans for food to make to eat during the Jaguars game. Unfortunately the Jaguars aren't playing this week, so that plan sort of fell through, so instead we watched the Vikings game for Mike. Pretty good game, especially the fourth quarter, though I must admit I slept through some of it. All that eating wore me out.

We started our day with a smoothie for breakfast (didn't want to weigh ourselves down too early). Then we got cracking with the food. We made 2 dips: 1 with eggplant and 1 with spinach and cannellini beans. Both were awesome. To go along with these dips we attempted to make some butternut squash chips. We do this with both squash and sweet potato fairly regularly, but for some reason it totally didn't work today. So we ended up with some kind of mushy baked squash pieces. Still tasted good. Luckily we had also decided to make some pita bread to have with our dip. Yup, pita bread! From scratch! It was awesome!

You roll the dough out really thin and then they puff right up in the oven. So cool. They were yummy, too. Now I totally want to have a Mediterranean dinner party.

After the game (and my nap) we had one more kitchen task for the day: roasting chicken. Yes, we're currently roasting 2 chickens in the oven. One's just your basic roast chicken, with garlic and lemon, and the other one has a Caribbean rub and basting sauce. I'm not so sure we'll be hungry enough to eat much chicken tonight, but that's ok. It just means we'll have food ready to go for dinners this week. We have big plans to make some chicken salad to eat in our leftover pitas. Anyway, our kitchen is clearly a bit of a disaster right now, as can be seen in this picture. Alfred tried his best to get out of the frame. Ha! Got him!

I just remembered the other reason I like fall: cranberries are in season! Last year we found this amazing cranberry chutney recipe, not realizing that we were at the end of cranberry season. So we've been waiting months for fresh cranberries to be at the store again. We made our first batch yesterday. It's so damn good. I might have to go sneak a spoonful right now.